Neil Armstrong: RIP

The very first bit of history I ever learned went exactly like this: Man walked on the moon when I was just two months old and he said, “That was one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” and that man’s name was Neil Armstrong. Age three, maybe four, I was so proud to know all that.

Still am.

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I’m a couple of years older than you. I was six when the moon landing occurred and my parents kept me up to see the landing. The following night when I was on the back porch I declared that I could see them up there. When I went over to see my mother today I knew I was going to hear a repeat of that story. Heard the story on the same back porch.

A thousand years from now no one will remember our names or the lives we lead in our time but the people living in that future time will still know the name Neil Armstrong and what he and Buzz Aldrin did that day in 1969.

I was a cub scout in Southern California. My Den had been invited by the US Navy to view the landing from a Destroyer sitting in Long Beach harbor. All of us living in Southern California in those days had watched as parts of the space program made its way out to Florida from places like North American Aviation in Downey, where the Command Module was made and the Douglas plant in Long Beach where the upper Stage of the Saturn V was made. Every time we watched the Super Guppy leave from the Douglas plant and we just knew that a little piece of us was on its way out into space.

What I watched that day on the little black and white screen in the crowded galley of a little Destroyer wasnt just the space program achieving the goal set forth by the President just a few years before, it was “the death of the impossible”. My fathers generation and my grandfathers and every generation before them had always used the moon as a measure of something impossible to achieve. No matter where you were in your station on life or on earth, the moon was always there to remind you that no matter who you were, there were limits.

And yet there it was, on that horrible scratchy over-the-air analog TV video screen, men from the earth – walking on the moon! Im not at all embarrassed to tell you that our first reaction after Neil put his foot down was to go outside and see if we could see the moon and the astronauts. I think half the planet did the same thing that day.

What was once impossible was now seen as simply a question of wanting to do it. Once we willed it to be done, it was possible. We changed, the species itself changed on that day, because everyone around the world changed a little bit when we all saw that men had made it to the moon.

And now may I ask, where is the memorial to this man? It used to be common in our culture that when great men passed on we took a moment to honor them, have we so callous that we have forgotten this common courtesy of civilization?

Why is there no call for a moment of silence? Why is there no passing of his coffin through the towns of America? Have we become so selfish that the act of honor is now too much to bear?

“Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.” Still chokes me up when I read those words..

Today I was telling some friends, who aren’t nearly the space program buffs I am, about what happened during Eagle’s descent to Tranquility Base, stuff most people don’t know.

The part where the landing site was littered with boulders and Armstrong had to fly around looking for someplace else to land, managing touchdown with less than a minute of fuel left before he would pass the point where an abort was still possible.

It’s literally one of my earliest significant memories. I was five and napping. I remember like it was yesterday, my mom waking me up to watch it through sleepy eyes and that she was taking an 8mm movie of the television picture.

I don’t remember the landing. I was 5 years old and there was a lot of hullabaloo about it, but the landing itself I just don’t remember. What I do remember, vividly was the start of the return home. They’d set up a remote camera outside the LEM, and in that high contrast black and white they launched the LEM from the moon. I recall being surprised they left so much of it behind. I’d assumed the base section was all one piece, but there it still was when the bulbous crew section shot skyward.